The origin of the Usher of the Black Rod goes back to early fourteenth century England . Today, with no royal duties to perform, the Usher knocks on the doors of the House of Commons with the Black Rod at the start of Parliament to summon the members. The rod is a symbol for the authority of debate in the upper house.
We of The Black Rod have adopted the symbol to knock some sense and the right questions into the heads of Legislators, pundits, and other opinion makers.

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We are citizen journalists in Winnipeg. When not breaking exclusive stories, we analyze news coverage by the mainstream media and highlight bias, ignorance, incompetence, flawed logic, missed angles and, where warranted, good work. We serve as the only overall news monitors in the province of Manitoba. We do the same with politicians (who require even more monitoring.) EMAIL: black_rod_usher@yahoo.com

Friday, October 25, 2013

The Firehalls Scandal: It ain't the crime, it's the cover-up that gets you.

A
majority of Winnipeg city councillors decided Wednesday that the way to
recapture the public's trust was to appoint as the city's top
administrator a man who deserves to be fired for his role in the gross
mismanagement and blatant favoritism that characterizes the Firehalls
Scandal that's consuming City Hall.

Way to go, team.

Eleven
councillors voted to appoint Deepak Joshi, the current Chief Operating
Officer, as acting Chief Administrative Officer (CAO) to replace his
mentor, Phil Sheegl, whose disastrous term ended last week when he quit
just days before he would have gotten the axe.

It's
okay, they said, because Joshi will only be in charge of the city for a
few months until a permanent CAO is picked. And who wants to dwell on
the past, when we can look forward to building a better city, blah blah blah.

Well,
to quote Shakespeare, what's past is prologue. An audit into the
disastrous project of building four new fire stations for Winnipeg found
that Joshi was involved up to his neck in the lies and deception
fostered by Sheegl.

One
developer that never won a single tender got the job to build all four
firehalls with a nod and a wink from former CAO Phil Sheegl. Joshi
was keep abreast of every major step of the process and helped keep the
deals with developer Shindico secret from city council despite a clear
directive from council to be informed of who got the contracts for the
job.

Now he's
being rewarded with the top job though he's barely less guilty of
deceiving council than his predecessor. And his role in the cover-up is
just as great.

Ahh, the cover-up. It's been all but glossed over in the reaction to the audit's findings.

But the perpetrators deserve to be named and shamed and held accountable. Here goes...

* The Firehalls Scandal was almost uncovered first in July, 2012, by St. James councillor Scott Fielding.

One
of the four new firehalls, Station No. 11, was being built in his ward
and residents were upset at the loss of greenspace in the area. City
officials suggested a proposed shift in location of the station would
"reduce the overall footprint of the station by about 600 square feet,"
to quote the only newspaper account in Canstar's The Metro weekly.

Fielding
sat on Assiniboia community committee which had to approve the
location change. The newspaper said he "noted a letter sent by the hotel
(the Viscount Gort...ed) to the community about the hearing misled
residents into believing the station was expanding in size and taking
up more greenspace inside the cloverleaf when the opposite was true."

The
Firehalls audit offers this information: " The original RFP specified a
station of approximately 10,000 sq. ft. To meet the specification
requested in the original RFP, Shindico’s response included a station
design that was 11,564 sq. ft. The final design for Portage - Station
#11 was 14,459 sq. ft."

In
other words, the letter circulated by the Viscount Gort was accurate.
The fire hall was significantly larger than local residents were told
it would be. Fielding was completely wrong when he accused them of
misleading the public.

Wednesday, Fielding claimed he had been misled by city officials on the size of the station. The cover-up had started.

Fielding
was not interviewed by the auditors. They spoke only to one
councillor, Paula Havixbeck, the former chair of the protection
committee, and only because she approached them. Fielding never
informed the auditors of being lied to by city officials and never
identified who they were. He's still keeping that information to
himself.

Had he
pursued the information given to him by area whistleblowers, he could
have stumbled onto part of the secret that Sheegl, Joshi and others were
hiding from the public.

*
Instead, that distinction goes to CBC reporter Sean Kavanagh. In
August, 2012, he broke a story that developer Shindico was advertising
to lease an abandoned firehall. The problem was that the land were the
firehall sat had never been declared surplus by the city.

This
looked like an interesting story because this was not the first time
that Shindico had offered land that hadn't yet been designated surplus.
It looked like the developer was getting tips from inside City Hall.
CBC didn't yet know how big the story was or would be.

But within days, it snowballed.

*
Barry Thorgrimson, the city's director of property, planning and
development, revealed that the fire department had itself arranged a
"land swap" with Shindico, and he had been left out of the
negotiations. But, he said, "...the property was declared surplus and
we are in a position to transfer titles over."

Not.

City
sources quickly pointed out that the land had never officially been
declared surplus. How could the director of property get it wrong?

* A few days later, Mayor Sam Katz stepped in to explain, and further the cover-up.

It
was no big deal, he said. "Everybody" knew the land Shindico was
advertising was or soon would be surplus. After all, it had been stated
three years earlier in the city decision to start the process of
upgrading fire stations that the cost would be partially offset by
selling the land where the old stations stood. "Everybody" knew that,
he said.

But
"everybody", especially city councillors, sensed there was something
odd and wrong about the land swap, and kept asking questions. A couple
of days later, ‎Barry Thorgrimson, Director of Planning, Property and
Development for the City of Winnipeg, popped up again, in the company of
Fire Chief Reid Douglas.

"The
two directors say the land swap originated in 2009 when the city
issued a request for qualifications for companies capable of building
four new fire-paramedic stations in Charleswood, Sage Creek, St. James
and River Heights. Nine firms responded and seven were deemed to be
qualified, Thorgrimson and Douglas said.

"The
city sent those seven firms a request for proposals to build the fire
halls, stipulating the successful bidder must propose sites for the
relocations. There were specific geographic requirements to ensure
emergency response times would be under six minutes, Douglas said."

"Of those companies, only Shindico responded and thus won the bid to build the new fire halls, Thorgrimson said."

Only
that was false. Shindico didn't win a bid to build the new fire halls.
Its bid was rejected along with the others. CAO Phil Sheegl personally
made the decision to sole source the fire halls with Shindico.

Thorgrimson wasn't telling that story.

* The very next day, the conspirators must have realized their version of the truth wasn't convincing anyone.

So they went for broke.

Phil
Sheegl convened an unprecedented collection of city officials for a
controlled news conference with one goal---to convince the select
invited reporters that enough was enough, that "(T)here's nothing
that's been done that's untoward."

Here was a conglomeration of the most powerful civil servants working for the city. Would they lie to you?

"I think we followed all the procedures and policies we have," said Sheegl, and they nodded their heads.

"...they
all stood beside Sheegl when he sounded the all-clear and said nothing
to reporters from the Free Press and CBC Manitoba," wrote Free Press
reporter Barley Kives, who was one of two journalists invited, in an
angry column Tuesday. "All, in effect if not intent, lied to the
public."

Perhaps
the most egregious silence was from Barb D'Avignon, who had probably
the lowest profile of all the faces around the table. Former Fire Chief
Douglas told the auditors that the reason city council was never
informed of who got the $15 million contract to build four new
firehalls was because she advised him that it was "normal practice and
acceptable" to split the project into four separate jobs to keep the
budget of each under $10 million, the threshhold at which council had
to be notified. This is why nobody knew Sheegl had given the job to
Shindico.

It quickly became apparent the full court press had not worked. It was time for a new tack.

*
Four days later, a conciliatory Mayor announced he intended to clear
the air over the firehalls land swap controversy. He was, he said,
appointing CFO Mike Ruta to review the firehalls project and to
determine if the city got value for its money. Assisting him would be
CAO Phil Sheegl.

Somebody
is stealing chickens from the hen house. I've appointed Mr. Weasel and
Mr. Fox to investigate and get to the bottom of it.

Katz said he was against examining the processes that led to the land swap; he wanted a financial assessment first.

The
Sheegl-Ruta report was ready by Sept. 21, waiting only for the
signature of city auditor Brian Whiteside before it could be presented
to the Mayor.

But
Whiteside refused to sign on. There were still too many unanswered
questions. Katz, who was in New York on city business, had to rush
back. His carefully orchestrated whitewash report had been derailed.

*
A few days later, the Mayor had changed his mind again. He was now
ordering the city auditor to launch an audit of the firehalls program,
exactly what he had refused to do a few weeks earlier.

Katz
may have known how that would turn out. The cover-up entered a vicious
phase, where the best defence would be an offence. No more Mr.Nice Guy.
He would lash out at anybody who challenged him, and he soon got his
chance.

*
Rookie councillor Paula Havixbeck had become chair of the Protection
Committee and had a seat at the table of Executive Policy Committee.
She was getting frustrated at the lack of answers she was getting
regarding the escalating costs of the last of the four firehalls to be
built. She did the unthinkable. She ordered Phil Sheegl and Deepak
Joshi to appear before her committee.

Ordered.
Nobody orders Sheegl to do anything. And here was this rookie
councillor ordering him to show up and answer her questions.

He
showed up but he didn't answer much. Neither did his sidekick, Joshi.
He did afterward declare to reporters, though, "For me as the CAO and
the head of the administration, I have the support of Deepak Joshi and
the CFO, my directors and my chiefs, who I believe have 110 per cent
confidence in my leadership, as do I have 110 per cent confidence in
their abilities."

* Sheegl's
best friend, Mayor Sam Katz, was livid. How dare she not show the
proper deference to Phil Sheegl. Who did she think she was? He struck
back immediately. Only 3 days later he removed Havixbeck from her post
as head of the Protection Committee.

And two months later -- he kicked her off EPC.

It wasn't retaliation, he insisted.

It
was the last gasp of the cover-up.

Sure, Sheegl fired the fire chief
after he got a preview of the audit and what the fire chief said about
him. But his power to do much more was gone.

He strong-armed a severance
package and jumped out the window before he could be pushed, leaving
Sam Katz to handle what was left of the cover-up.

Joshi, and his 110 per cent confidence in Sheegl's leadership, is Katz's best shot.

He
couldn`t even stop the vote to get outside legal advice into whether
the audit uncovered criminal or unethical activity that should be
brought to the attention of authorities. Does aiding and abetting
a cover-up fall under that direction?